chapter forty-three

“Paul. Paul!” I stepped out from behind the counter, grabbed him by the shirt front, and shook him like a maraca. “Your invention is wonderful.”

The shaking slowed a bit. His, not mine.

“It is! It is. You’ve done a great thing with HOAP and HOAP.1,” I soothed. “It’s terrific.” Yep. Terrific. Staggering. Terrifying. “But the world isn’t ready for it yet, okay? Just like the world wasn’t ready for George’s blond phase two years ago, remember?”

“Hey! I rocked that do.”

“Pay no attention to the man cowering behind the counter, Paul. You’ll just have to fix it, is all. You’ll have to make it better. You’re used to that.” Hell, the poor guy was driven to it. “So you’ll figure out what went wrong…” You’ll reprogram HOAP.2 so it won’t goad unstable people into killing people. “You’ll fix it. It’s just, for now, it’s gotta go back to the drawing board.” And how. “Law enforcement isn’t ready for it the way it is now. Sometime in the future, it will save lives. More lives,” I corrected myself. “Once you’ve gotten the bugs out. In the future, there won’t be cops. In the future, HOAP will do it all and they’ll catch a serial on his first or second murder, not his third.” Charles Albright. “Or his eleventh.” Charles Starkweather. “Or his eightieth.” Carl Eugene Watts.

“A shattered, dystopian, fascist future,” George added, clutching his head. Despite how dreadful the situation was, it gave me mean pleasure to see him rubbing his forehead the way I often did when faced with his nonsense.

“Well, yes.” Anything that gave George cause for alarm was Armageddon-esque. “But that’s a worry for another day.”

I couldn’t get Paul to smile, but I was able to get him to stop shaking. That was the closest to a win I figured we would get that weekend.